Incredible TED Talk about truth and happiness

This blog started as two separate blogs, one about truth and one about happiness. I decided to combine them because.....I'm not really sure why, it just seemed like a good idea, even though there didn't seem to be much to connect the two themes.

Until now. This video reveals the connection I knew was there all along.

It's a guy called Dan Gilbert, talking about how stupid we are about what's likely to make us happy (as opposed to what really does make us happy), and why that is. He's talking about cognitive biases, and how they affect the search for happiness. As if that weren't enough, he manages to work in gambling, evolutionary psychology, and the survival of the human race, all in 11 minutes.

Here's the intro:

We all make decisions every day. We want to know what the right thing is to do, in domains from the financial, to the gastronomic, to the professional, to the romantic. And surely, if somebody could really tell us how to exactly the right thing at all possible times, that would be tremendous gift.

It turns out that, in fact, the world was given this gift in 1738, by a Dutch polymath named Danel Bernoulli. What I want to talk to you about today is what that gift is, and I also want to explain to you why it is that it hasn't made a damn bit of difference.